The complete and unedited transcript of the interview and Assange’s early enthusiasm for the Bitcoin can be found on WikiLeaks. It shows a strange view of the history of technology and Schmidt’s curiosity about the digital currency.

Assange claimed about the Bitcoin secret: “Google would own the planet.”

Although this Bitcoin secret may sound like a courageous statement by a controversial figure, Assange has indeed had serious discussions with former Google Executive and CEO Eric Schmidt in the past: https://www.onlinebetrug.net/en/bitcoin-secret/

The discussion was later profiled during his work on Schmidt’s book “The New Digital Age”. The book was co-authored by former Hillary Clinton consultant Jared Cohem and published in 2013.

The complete and unedited transcript of the interview and Assange’s early enthusiasm for Bitcoin can be found on WikiLeaks. It shows a strange view of the history of technology and Schmidt’s curiosity about the digital currency.

At that time Assange had tried to convince Schmidt:

“You should get in early enough. Your Bitcoins will one day be worth a lot of money.”

A Bitcoin lesson
In the 5-hour conversation, Assange and Schmidt discussed various topics such as technology, privacy and data encryption. Suddenly Assange asked Schmidt if he had heard of Bitcoin before. Schmidt replied no, but Cohen pointed out that he had read about Bitcoin the day before. The founder of WikiLeaks saw the emergence of Bitcoin as a by-product of subgund encryption enthusiasts and repeatedly pointed out the cryptographic potential of the Bitcoin protocol and its structure.

“Bitcoin is something that was developed by cyberpunks a few years ago and it’s an alternative… It’s a stateless currency.”

He compared the Bitcoin to gold as a store of value and currency. Assange said back then that the Bitcoin price would be subject to strong price fluctuations in the future. However, he had no idea that the Bitcoin price would rise to almost USD 1,300 in the winter of 2013. The founder of WikiLeaks went into more detail and talked about Bitcoin mining and the parallels to gold mining. He explained the increasing difficulty of mining and the artificially created scarcity. He also mentioned some arguments for Bitcoin acceptance.

The WikiLeaks founder explained:

“Bitcoin scarcity will grow more and more over time and what does this mean for the Bitcoin incentive? You should get into the Bitcoin business now, as early as possible”.

Google’s Bitcoin attitude remains unclear
It looked as if the Bitcoin had awakened Google’s curiosity, but since Google has announced it will continue to investigate digital currencies, one has only heard of worried reticence. Earlier this year, some emails leaked out saying that Google was looking for ways to integrate Bitcoin. In a subsequent statement by Vice President Vic Gundotra, Google distanced itself from the statement. Cohen himself expressed cautious support for Bitcoin during a speech at the SXSW festival. At the time, he said that digital currencies are “inevitable”, but the way to get there is unclear.

A study has found 34,200 vulnerabilities in Ethereum-based smart contracts. With almost one million contracts checked, this corresponds to 3% of the Smart Contracts tested. What does this mean for future investments in ICOs?

Bitcoin news: Smart Contracts are probably the first feature associated with Ethereum

The concept behind Smart Contracts was defined long before by Nick Szabo in 1994. According to Bitcoin news, a smart contract is an automatic process that is contractually regulated. Withdrawing money from ATMs is an illustrative example of such a smart contract.

So far, so banal. Thanks to blockchain technology, however, these smart contracts become additionally transparent and can fully exploit their potential. They can be viewed during the term, whereby an open source system becomes an open execution system and a smart contract can really be a contract due to this transparency.

At the time of the DAO, a decentralized venture fund in 2016, a frequently heard bon mot was “The Code is the Law”.

The downside of this statement unfortunately had to be discovered in the course of the DAO exploit: A person or group of people still unknown today has stolen DAO Ether worth 60 million US dollars. This was not made possible by a hack, but by a security hole in the Smart Contract behind the DAO.

And that was by no means the only vulnerability: The Smart Contract underlying the Parity Multi Signature Wallet was accidentally deleted, freezing US$230 million worth of ether.

3% of Smart Contracts have security holes

Nikolic et al have now written a paper on “Security gaps in Smart Contracts”. Various news portals have skilfully chosen titles to focus on 34,200 security vulnerabilities. The market reacted promptly and the Ethereum share price fell by 9%. Although the articles discuss the total number of smart contracts examined, a percentage in the headline would probably be less dramatic.

In any case, security gaps were found in 34,200 Smart Contracts – in a sample of 971,000 examined codes. This corresponds to a percentage of 3%.

That doesn’t sound like much in itself – at least much more banal than data on 30,000! In various industries, manufacturers could live with a failure rate of 3%. For the ICO investor and the user of Smart Contracts, however, this means that caution should be called for. In this context, publication serves to raise awareness, but not to panic.

The number of bitcoins excavated is not equal to the number of bitcoins available. Theoretically, there are about 21 million bitcoins in circulation, but certain events may cause not all bitcoins to be output.

If the private key is lost and the accessible bit coins can no longer be moved, the probability of encountering a particular output is so low that it is considered impossible. In concrete terms, this means that an output of 50 BTC whose associated private key no longer exists is lost forever. These bitcoins belong to the maximum money supply of the 21 million, but they are no longer available.

How many bitcoin loophole are lost cannot be determined precisely

Estimates range between three and four million Bitcoin loophole lost. This scam was detected by onlinebetrug. On the other hand, there could be fractional reserve banking with Bitcoin. The alleged amount of money would exceed the number of coins mined. This phenomenon cannot happen on the blockchain itself, but only if, for example, exchanges attribute more Bitcoin to their users than they actually store on a wallet themselves.

A similar situation occurred on the Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox in 2013. Back then, hackers gained access to the Mt.Gox wallet and stole Bitcoin. The users’ Bitcoin managed Mt.Gox with a MySQL database and this attributed Bitcoin to the users who were not on reserve.

How does the output of Bitcoin work?

Bitcoin’s emission curve is modeled so that Bitcoin is finite. Satoshi Nakamoto programmed this emission into the Bitcoin code. He specified that the coinbase, the transaction where new Bitcoin is created, would be halved every 210,000 blocks. Since it takes an average of ten minutes for a new block to see the light of day, 210,000 blocks correspond to approximately four years. The initial reward for a block in 2009 was 50 BTC. Meanwhile, in 2018, we already experienced two halves, the coinbase is now only 12.5 BTC.

The halving of the Coinbase will continue and the rate at which new Bitcoin will be issued will decrease. One day the coinbase will drop to zero. This means that no new Bitcoin will enter the ecosystem.

Bitcoin died as his Hodlers are blinded, says Victor Gojdka of the SZ in a BTC rant disguised as commentary. The mother of all crypto currencies, who congratulated Gojdka on her tenth birthday in November, failed to keep her many promises of salvation. Instead of finally recognizing this reality and waking up from the dream of exploring the lunar landscape in the Lambo, the Bitcoin community does not lose the excuse to continue hatching:

Crypto trader always finds some excuse for Bitcoin’s infirmity:

Once an American star crypto trader got angry at Bitcoin and caused panic. Read more about it: https://www.onlinebetrug.net/en/crypto-trader-review/ Recently, it has been said, the struggle of two major players in the encryption business has shocked investors.

In fact, many consider the debacle surrounding Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV as one of the reasons why the encryption market is in trouble. For example, a certain Victor Gojdka was the protagonist of the Zürcher Tagesanzeiger on November 22:

“Two dimensions of Bitcoin are sabotaging their factory – since the beginning of the year, Bitcoin has lost almost 70% of its value. A power struggle in the realm of cryptic currencies has also triggered uncertainty.

After all: Gojdka admits that “one or the other encrypted currency” has a chance of survival; at least “as long as it is useful in everyday life”. Bitcoin, however, would be one of the first manifestations of a new technology like Netscape, the forgotten web browser of the then still young Internet. According to this, the cryptographic community is as blinded as the first geeks who thought that the Internet was the next great technological revolution.

Phillip Horch discussed here that BTC is still alive despite the beating of the bear.

Bitcoin bags S&P 500, bet?

Meanwhile, Morgan Creek Digital Assets continues to rely on BTC – literally. The investment company bets a million U.S. dollars that its encryption index (77.4% Bitcoin, 11.1% Ethereum, the rest distributed among eight Altcoins) will beat the S&P 500 in the next ten years.

The idea was inspired by Warren Buffet, who in 2007 bet that the S&P 500 would perform better in ten years than a selection of Protégé Partners hedge funds – and he was right. Morgan Creek is still looking for an opponent. This shouldn’t be too hard to find, given the many well-off cryptoskeptics, right?

“Those who do not know the past are forced to repeat it,” said the Spanish philosopher George Santayana in the 19th century. It is important to know some basic features of the history of money. This is why today we are dealing with an important but relatively unknown interface in money history: How could it happen that a pure gold currency became a monetary system of gold-backed promissory notes? Why was the long-prevailing precious metal cover softened in the end and above all: This time our journey through time takes us from the fading Middle Ages to the modern age and ends with the Bitcoin, specifically: the Lightning Network.

Could this also happen to digital gold, the Bitcoin formula?

In the fading High Middle Ages towards the end of the 15th century, the monetary system became increasingly unstable. After more than 300 years of economic prosperity, the princes of Europe apparently lost their temper. Many sovereigns, however, exaggerated with the regular renewal of the metal coins of that time. The only form of tax was the regular exchange of “old” into “new” money. In many regions this was exchanged at a ratio of ten to eight: for ten old coins, eight new ones were obtained. In this way the money remained in flux and the princes made a profit of 20 percent. Read more about Bitcoin formula: Is The Bitcoin Formula a Scam? Beware, Read our Review First

When the sovereigns began to exchange money in ever worse proportions, about six to ten or even four to ten, the people no longer accepted the money that had become almost worthless. There were calls for new, more valuable money. The solution was the so-called “eternal penny” and precious metals, which in many places were increasingly traded as currency.

The monetary system of that time was strongly regional and its characteristics were somewhat different in each region. However, it is clear that the first gold coins of this epoch were minted in Italy in the 13th century. From there they spread, just like silver coins, bit by bit all over Europe. Crusades in the East and later the discovery of America in the West also opened up new sources of gold for Europe, which further boosted people’s greed for gold.

Why did gold become paper money?

The advantage of the precious metal currencies gradually establishing themselves was obvious: it consisted in the intrinsic value of the money earned. But the increasingly popular form of money also had disadvantages: On the one hand, it was impractical to spend because gold was not only very difficult to divide, but also complicated. To pay smaller sums with the precious metal turned out to be difficult. On the other hand, the money supply of gold could not be inflated at will. To finance wars, for example, this turned out to be a disadvantage. Paper money had better characteristics: It was easier to divide it into smaller units (and thus represented a better unit of account and a better medium of exchange, two other important core functions for money), it was easier to transport and, due to its gold coverage, it was as good a value store as gold. Originally paper money was only a receipt for the possession of “real” money, i.e. precious metals.

This is an unusual case even for the crisis-ridden crypto community: After the exit scam of the South Korean ICO Pure Bit, the founders show themselves purified and now want to compensate their victims.

It sounds like the news spy plot for a bad thriller

After the founders of the Pure Bit crypto exchange collected about 30 million US dollars in ether at the beginning of November, the news spy decided against the promised foundation and instead donated 13,000 ETH instead. The founder closed all social media groups and left the unsuspecting victims with the message “I’m sorry”. But that was not all. After only two weeks, the news spy founder apparently changed his mind and wanted to repay the stolen ether.

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New Korean exchange Pure Bit just pulled an exit scam claiming 13,000ETH from its investors as we speak. Kakao channels are emptying and the site has been pulled.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Karma comes back hard when you screw this many people over.

Then the turnaround
It is true that the case had caused little stir in this country. In South Korea, however, Pure Bit called all major media as well as the investigating authorities into action after the exit scam. This circumstance, as well as the sheer height of the stolen property, now seems to have moved the founders of the ICO to their 180-degree turn. As the news platform BlockchainROK announced via Twitter, the founder made a statement in the course of public pressure on 15 November. In it he shows himself purified and announces the exit of the exit:

The wording of the statement reads like this:

“This is Pure Bit speaking. First of all, I would like to apologize to everyone who was affected by the ICO. Since 5 November I have collected 16,000 ETH and not opened a crypto exchange as promised. I threw all my customers out of our social media chat groups and disappeared without a message. This has had a negative psychological and financial impact on investors.”

and further:

“I made an unforgivable mistake that cannot be undone, blinded by money. Less than a day has passed and I have already begun to suffer from feelings of guilt. Although it cannot be compared to the plight of the investors, I also felt a considerable guilt. I sincerely apologize to all of the ICO’s investors who were affected by the incident.”

It is unclear whether the founder, driven by remorse, rowed back or collapsed under broad public pressure. Investors should nevertheless be pleased. Pure Bit’s memory of one of the most curious exit scams in recent history is probably the only thing left of it.

You wouldn’t have expected that from Civil: This week the Blockchain project had to declare its ICO a failure. Despite the recent partnership with Forbes, the Blockchain journalism platform was unable to reach the minimum investment target (softcap) of eight million US dollars. If one of the few substantial ICOs of these days can no longer even earn a single-digit million amount, then the question arises whether ICOs in their current form have not abdicated.

In addition to all the air numbers, there are also blockchain projects that are really innovative and serious. Just a year ago, these blockchain projects could easily crack a softcap of 10, 20 or 30 million US dollars. Even obvious scams penetrated these areas. Now, after the bursting of the ICO bubble, the self-confidence of the blockchain projects is on the ground. The communication model of a Donald Trump has not worked for a long time. Too often investors have heard sentences like “We are the greatest” or “Nobody is as innovative as we are” from ICOs. The ICO hubris was caught up by reality: it was not delivered, the capital has started to retreat.

The 90-percent cryptosoft

The fact that ICO investments have declined is not bad per se says onlinebetrug. Due to the higher demands on the part of investors, fewer and fewer projects are managing to sell their tokens and list them on the stock markets. The flood of pointless tokens is thus contained and the market becomes more professional. This is a healthy development, albeit painful for many cryptosoft investors. Nevertheless, a collapse of around 90 percent of the ICO market points to a severe crisis in the ICO sector, there is no doubt about that.

This crisis is particularly evident in promising blockchain projects that are now barely able to achieve a relatively low soft cap by the end of 2017. Civil stands here for many failed ICOs who failed in the second half of 2018 despite a good team, serious partnerships and a demanding use case.

Is an ICO still worthwhile at all?

Quite a few blockchain companies therefore ask themselves whether they should still carry out an ICO at all. Moreover, marketing costs have long since decoupled. Expenditure is rising all the time in order to desperately attract attention from investors. The former promise of collecting tens of millions with little effort is history.

The hope now lies in a change in the entire ICO sector. Some blockchain start-ups prefer to wait and hope for a replacement of the term Initial Coin Offering and the emergence of Security Token Offerings (STOs). If security tokens can be presented in a regulated environment and with newly created trust, there will be many block-chain companies that will again actively consider issuing tokens.

From ICO to STO
The original basic idea of an ICO is ingenious and will prevail sooner or later. ICOs are the future of corporate financing, but they will probably no longer be called ICOs. They will mainly be security tokens that will replace pseudo-utility tokens. In contrast to ICOs, STOs are the more honest option when it comes to collecting capital for a company. The market will be determined primarily by institutional players, just as it is in the regulated financial sector. In isolated cases, there will be utility tokens again. In contrast to today’s utility tokens, however, these will assume a function in a truly decentralised network. There will be commercially successful cases in which more than a handful of people will use utility tokens for their intended purpose – not trading.

For the time being, however, the big money will flow, at least in the next few years, into security tokens and the tokenization of real assets – assuming regulatory foundations. Correspondingly, companies and investors are eagerly awaiting the regulatory authorities’ go-ahead.

The Japanese technology company Sony wants to expand its digital rights management system with the Blockchain technology. In this way, information on rights to written works is to be managed.

Sony has already come out several times as a Blockchain fan. The company already worked together with IBM on a blockchain-based education platform in the summer of last year. In April of this year, Sony even filed a patent concerning the use of blockchain technology for the administration of user rights. Now the company wants to use the security advantages of the technology to permanently manage the rights to written works.

Sony wants to extend digital rights management with Blockchain

The project is being developed jointly by Sony Music Entertainment Japan and Sony Global Education, as the company announced on 15 October from its website. There, Sony also explains why blockchain technology is currently the focus of the company’s development:

“Blockchains create networks in which programs and information are difficult to destroy or falsify and are well suited for the free transfer of data and rights. These characteristics give Blockchains many possible uses for a range of services, including finance, goods distribution management and sharing economy, and we expect that Blockchains will provide even more innovative services in the future”.

The new system will be based on an existing system for authentication, sharing and rights management of training data. However, it will also offer functions for processing rights information.

Sony explained that

“This newly developed system specialises in managing rights-related information from written works, with functions to demonstrate the date and time at which the electronic data was created, and using the properties of blockchains to record verifiable information in a manner that is difficult to forge and to identify pre-recorded work. This allows participants to share and verify when and by whom electronic data was created.”

These managed works can be electronic textbooks, music, films, VR content and books. This is intended to put a stop to legal disputes about who is the actual author of the work.